Monday, December 1, 2014

SLIFF 2014: Diplomacy

Title: Diplomacy

Country: France/Germany

Score: 5.5

August 24, 1944.
Paris. Germany is losing the war. General Choltitz is planning to withdraw from
the capitol. He has orders from Hitler to blow up the city’s great landmarks
and grand bridges behind him, killing potentially a million or more in the
resulting floods and leaving Paris’s cultural heritage in ruins. Raoul
Nordling, the Swedish consul, overhears the plans and sneaks into Choltitz’s
hotel room to talk him out of it. What results is a verbal game of cat and
mouse that will run through the night and into the next day.

It a good setup,
and the acting and much of the screenwriting work hard to do it justice. The
art direction is strong, and the room where most of the film takes place is
impeccably – one might even say too-impeccably – littered with historical artifacts.
The problem is that the usually reliable director Volker Schlondorff falls into
many of the pitfalls that so often plague both adaptations of history and of
plays: he doesn’t have enough faith in the source material.

The verbal
sparring is the heart of the film and the focal point of everything Diplomacy
does right: high-stakes tension pitched softly low-key, thoughtful debate
ranging from the value of posterity to the balance of duty and morality, and a
character study of world-weary but far from soulless men. And yet, presumably
wanting to ‘open things up’ from its one room setting, these scenes are
interrupted by a B-plot in which a message must be delivered to the demolition
team. They, of course, regardless of the final order, behave senselessly so
that there can be a little action and violence for the denouement that is both
thematically and structurally out of place.

Then too, the
writing works much better as a showcase for the two central performances than
as a truly deep think piece. In the first half of the film Choltitz’s appear to
have only spurious unsatisfying motivations, hardly worth the defense he puts
up. When he reveals in the second half that his family is being held hostage to
enforce the order, it invalidates most of the previous argument (and one rather
wonders why he didn’t bring it up first thing) and leads to a tedious debate
about whether it is better to save your loved ones or faceless thousands. It’s
a debate screenwriters love, but I do not.